Читать книгу Nein! - Paddy Ashdown - Страница 14

Late-evening sunlight streamed through the Palladian windows of the dining room of the National Liberal Club in London. It fell on a damask tablecloth laid with silver and porcelain in a secluded alcove set slightly apart from the other tables. The wooden panels all around glowed a deep mahogany, and the air resonated with the low murmur of diners enjoying themselves, despite the stern gaze of William Gladstone’s twice-life-size statue at the far end of the room.

The six men at the alcove table were not cheerful. They were sombre, quiet-voiced, and listening carefully to one of their number, an imposing figure with boyish good looks, startling light-grey eyes, heavy eyebrows and a forceful personality. The fifty-two-year-old Carl Goerdeler was a serious man who was used to being taken seriously. Ex-lord mayor of the great German city of Leipzig, until recently a key official in the government of Adolf Hitler and a sometime candidate for chancellor of Germany, Goerdeler was a dinner guest whom it was easier to listen to than to converse with.

Born on 31 July 1884 in the west Prussian town of Schneidemuehl, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the son of a district judge, had been a brilliant student at school, a brilliant law graduate at Tübingen University, and by all accounts a brilliant practising lawyer before finding his metier as an economist and senior official in German local government. He soon proved a talented and effective administrator, whose grasp of economics, incorruptible personality and ability to charm were quickly recognised. In 1912, at the age of just twenty-eight, Goerdeler was unanimously elected as principal assistant (effectively deputy) to the mayor of the Rhenish town of Solingen in western Germany. His military service on Germany’s Eastern Front in the First World War ended with a period as the administrator of a large swathe of territory in present-day Lithuania and Belarus which had been occupied by Germany under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918. Here he added a reputation for humanity and compassion to his other recognised virtues.

The Armistice in November 1918 changed everything for Goerdeler, and for Germany. Like most Germans, he felt that his country’s emasculation in the Versailles settlement inflicted a deep shame and injustice on his Fatherland. It was in these post-war years that Goerdeler the nationalist and patriot began to take form. The brutal amputation of Danzig from the ‘motherland’, in order to give newly-enlarged Poland a corridor to the sea, especially offended his sensitivities, both as a German and as a Prussian. He maintained a vocal opposition to this Versailles humiliation long after most other civil and military leaders had accepted the necessity to move on. This was as admirably fearless as it was tactically stupid. It was also an early example of a stubborn refusal to compromise when Goerdeler considered his cause just, which would become a leitmotif of his life until the very end.

By now Goerdeler’s political views had solidified. He was by upbringing a devout Lutheran, and by political conviction a conservative with an attraction to constitutional monarchism. He was authoritarian, patriotic, consumed by a belief in the power of political ideals and democracy (but only to the point where these did not interfere with efficient government). Economically, he believed in financial rectitude; in his dealings with others he was punctilious, in his personal habits he was frugal, and in his personal life he was guided by an unyielding moral code which even extended to refusing entry into his family home to those who had been divorced. One of his friends, and a future fellow plotter against Hitler, wrote: ‘Goerdeler was a clear-headed, decent, straightforward kind of man who had very little or nothing about him which was sombre, unresolved or enigmatic. He therefore assumed his fellow human beings needed only enlightenment and well-meaning moral instruction to overcome the error of their ways.’

These qualities would have made Carl Goerdeler a great man in any stable age, but they rendered him a hopelessly naïve utopian in the cruel age of turbulence and revolution in which he had to live his life.

After a period as the deputy mayor of Königsberg on the Baltic coast during the 1920s, Goerdeler was elected Oberbürgermeister (lord mayor) of Leipzig in 1930, just two months before his forty-sixth birthday. Now he was a big figure on the national stage. At the time he took over the Leipzig administration, Germany was midway through its second great economic convulsion, following the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s. In December 1931, with unemployment rocketing, Goerdeler accepted an invitation from President Hindenburg to join his government as Reichskommissar (State Commissioner) for price control. His deft handling of this delicate role earned him widespread acclaim. When Hindenburg’s chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, resigned in May 1932, Goerdeler was widely thought of as his successor. But the political turmoil which ensued did not produce a man of rectitude and order – it produced instead Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.

Carl Goerdeler

Goerdeler did not at first oppose Hitler. He saw the new chancellor as potentially an enlightened dictator, who with the right advice could be a force for good and for order after the upheavals and failures of the Weimar years.

It did not take long for the scales to fall from the lord mayor of Leipzig’s eyes.

On 1 April 1933, when the city’s Jewish businesses were threatened by Nazi stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA) during Hitler’s ‘day of national boycott’, it required an appearance by the mayor in full ceremonial dress, backed by the police, to save the situation from descending into violence and calamity. There followed several instances when Goerdeler had to intervene personally to save Jewish enterprises from the consequences of Hitler’s policy of sequestrating Jewish assets and businesses in order to ‘Aryanise’ the German economy.

There was worse – much worse – to come. On 30 June 1934 Hitler launched the internal putsch which history has come to know as the Night of the Long Knives. The ostensible purpose of this act of national bloodletting was to exterminate the paramilitary SA, which Hitler saw as a growing threat to his power. But the killings extended into a general orgy of score-settling with enemies of the Nazi regime. Among the eighty-five killed were the army general who was Hitler’s immediate predecessor as chancellor, the personal secretary of another chancellor, and several Catholic political leaders. It was now plain to all that Hitler’s government was prepared to behave illegally, unscrupulously, murderously, and completely without reference to either moral or legal codes. This was a turning point for many.

But not, despite all his moral rectitude, for Carl Goerdeler.

On 5 November 1934, barely four months after the Night of the Long Knives, Goerdeler accepted an offer from Hitler to become, for the second time, Germany’s commissioner for price control. His decision to serve Hitler at this time was one he would find difficult to explain later. Why did he do it? The answer provides keys to two of the most puzzling paradoxes of Goerdeler’s complex personality. Alongside an all-consuming conviction of what was right and wrong, including a willingness to accept any personal sacrifice rather than to submit, he also possessed an almost childlike ignorance about the true nature of evil. Because of this, despite his worldly wisdom in matters of politics, government and the economy, he completely overestimated his ability to persuade bad men to do good things, by talking sensibly to them.

The truth was that Goerdeler accepted Hitler’s post because he believed he could change him. His chosen weapons for doing this were a stream of long (in some cases very long) memoranda and papers on the economy, directed at the chancellor. These were read either skimpily or not at all. Following a succession of turf battles and disagreements on public policymaking, the inevitable rupture between the two men occurred in 1936, when Goerdeler lost all power and influence in Hitler’s circle.

This was the moment for which the lord mayor’s Nazi enemies in Leipzig had been waiting.

In early November that year, the Oberbürgermeister was invited to speak at the German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce in Helsinki. At the time Goerdeler was under attack by the local Leipzig Nazi leader because of his refusal to remove the statue of Felix Mendelssohn, the great German-Jewish composer, from its position outside the city’s concert hall. Pointing out the statue to a visitor, the Oberbürgermeister complained: ‘There is one of my problems. They [the Brownshirts] are after me to remove that monument. But if they ever touch it I am finished here.’ To his daughter Marianne he seems to have indicated that what really affronted him was an outrageous attack not so much on a Jew, as on German culture: ‘All of us listened to Mendelssohn’s songs with great pleasure and sang them as well. To deny Mendelssohn is nothing, but an absurd, cowardly act.’

Before leaving for Helsinki, Goerdeler extracted promises from Hitler and Himmler that they would personally ensure the safety of the statue in his absence. Nevertheless, the local Nazis pulled it down while he was away. Returning to Leipzig in a fury, Goerdeler issued an ultimatum that the missing statue should be replaced forthwith. When it wasn’t, in typical Goerdeler style, he resigned. It should be noted that his resignation was far more a protest against the loss of his authority than against anti-Semitism, for his position on the Jews at this time was at best ambivalent. Even so, for this act of principle against tyranny and of protest against an outrage to German culture, Carl Goerdeler became an overnight hero to many across Germany who saw him as having sacrificed his public career rather than lend his name to a shameful deed.

As the bearer of all that was good and great about German culture, order and respect for the law, Goerdeler, who never liked to be without a mission for long, now decided that personal responsibility and conscience demanded that he should henceforth dedicate his superhuman energy, ability and moral purpose to a single end – the removal of Adolf Hitler.

His first task was to warn the world about the true nature of the German dictator and the threat that he posed. But how? Goerdeler was, after all, not only without a job, but also without a passport, which had been confiscated by a local Gauleiter.

What he needed for his new mission was money, and his passport back.

The money came from Robert Bosch, the head of the Bosch industrial empire and leader of a small group of Stuttgart democrats who were hostile to Hitler. Bosch appointed Goerdeler (who had already turned down a post with Alfred Krupp, a man of very different political views) as financial and international adviser to his firm, so providing him with both a reason to go abroad and a comfortable salary to live on.

Goerdeler got his passport back from an unexpected source – Hermann Göring. Göring, who was in charge of the German rearmament programme at the time, was becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of a future war. Cleverly playing on this (and probably also on Göring’s desire to build up his own private information network) Goerdeler proposed that he should undertake a foreign tour, and report back on opinion in Western capitals. Göring jumped at the idea, arranging for the return of Goerdeler’s passport and instructing his new emissary as they parted that he should always remember on his travels to conduct himself ‘as a patriot’.

The would-be wanderer left Berlin on 3 June 1937, at the beginning of a series of foreign trips which over the next two years would take him to Belgium, Britain (twice), Holland, France (twice), Canada, the USA, Switzerland (twice), Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Turkey.

His message was always the same. Hitler was evil; his government had done evil things, and would do many more; he had neither moral restraint nor human scruple; his aim was war, and if he was left unchallenged, war would be inevitable. The only way to avoid this was for the Western powers to be firm in opposing him – ‘call black, black and white, white’ as he put it. Any equivocation or appeasement would be regarded by Hitler as weakness, and would further inflame his megalomania. If standing firm against Hitler was the policy of the Western powers, Goerdeler promised, he and his friends would get rid of him from inside Germany – even at risk of their lives.

It must have been startling for the quiet English gentlemen sitting around the dining table in the comforting normality of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall to realise that they were being warned of an impending putsch designed to remove Hitler and change the government of Germany.

Standing in the darkness on the pavement outside the club after they had waved their guest goodbye in a London taxi, one of the company said to their host, ‘He has decided with commendable courage to go forth and fearlessly condemn the Hitler regime, regardless of what the personal consequences may be’.

Goerdeler’s fellow diners that night were not in themselves in any way remarkable. They consisted of an ex-World War I fighter pilot, an industrialist, a renowned German educationalist and a middle-ranking civil servant. They had been brought together for the occasion by Arthur Primrose Young. Young (he preferred to be known as ‘A.P.’, in preference to anything which included Primrose) was a senior industrialist and a member of a small group who acted as occasional gatherers of intelligence for Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office and close adviser to Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. Every word that was said that night would be reported back. Vansittart was the invisible seventh diner at the table on this ordinary July evening in 1937.

Most permanent under secretaries at the British Foreign Office are unobtrusive, background men, whose voices are seldom heard. But Sir Robert Vansittart – widely known in Whitehall as ‘Van’ – was different. Knowledgeable, clever and very well informed, he was so influential over Eden that the foreign secretary was often maliciously referred to behind his back as ‘His Master’s Voice’ – the point of the barb being that ‘Van’ was the foreign secretary’s master, not the other way round.

Vansittart was, in short, anything but quiet and unobtrusive. His frequently-voiced concerns about the rise of Hitler were so contrary to the appeasement policy of His Majesty’s Government of the time that one of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s close advisers referred to him as ‘an alarmist, [who] hampered all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states’.

A few days later, Goerdeler had a meeting with Vansittart, no doubt as a result of Young’s report on the National Liberal Club dinner. Afterwards, Van wrote a memorandum to Eden for circulation to the cabinet. In it he underlined Goerdeler’s warnings, referring to the visiting German as ‘an impressive, wise and weighty man [who by coming to Britain is] putting his neck in a halter’.

Vansittart’s minute got no further than Eden’s desk. It did not accord with the prevailing government policy of appeasement, and would therefore, the foreign secretary judged, not be welcomed by his cabinet colleagues.

The minute still exists in Van’s private papers. On it, in Vansittart’s hand, are written the words: ‘Suppressed by Eden’.